Old published stuff

Posted by Stewart Turner The old line about “foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs” has been trotted out since around the time Eve lost that fruit-picking position in the Garden of Eden, and politicians of all persuasions are always eager wheel out guff about “British jobs for British workers” if they smell a few votes in it. But do we Brits really want to do the jobs that’ve been stolen? That’s what Evan Davis attempted to find out - by plucking 12 long-term unemployed from the town of Wisbech and giving them a couple of days work while the immigrants took a well-earned rest. With 3000 foreign workers and 3000 unemployed locals, the East Anglian town was a perfect place to test the theory. It’s also a place of back-breaking work in stark asparagus fields and eight hour shifts in front of conveyor belts full of maris pipers – not exactly dream jobs by any stretch of the imagination. As the potato factory owner pointed out,...

Posted by Stewart Turner Not since Adolf Hitler invaded Poland has one person been as loathed by the Great British Public as Heather Mills. Never one to admit defeat, and obviously buoyed by her decent showing on Dancing On Ice , the much-maligned ex-Mrs McCartney clearly believes we’re still there to be won over. Whether an hour’s televised psychoanalysis is the right way to do it is another matter, although a few people would doubtless agree a session with an analyst was long overdue. And it didn’t take a swinging pocket watch or some word association to penetrate Heather’s innermost thoughts – by the end of the show she was practically analysing herself. We kicked off with a potted history of Heather’s much discussed childhood, which mainly centred on her violent, abusive dad, who was under the impression he was the dead German composer Richard Wagner. After her mum left, the abuse centred on Heather and her sisters. It’s hard not to be shocked at the upbringing and rotten luck ...

Posted by Stewart Turner After a few months out of the limelight courtesy of their brothers and sisters over at British Airways, it was the turn of that other British business behemoth to be thrust back into the public consciousness last night. Some six years after they exposed the full horrors of your average Royal Mail sorting office, the Dispatches team returned to see if things have improved. The answer was a predictably resounding ‘No’. It’s still a place where greetings cards are routinely torn open in the hope of snaffling some birthday money; and the back office is still a throwback to the bad old days of industrial strife, where workers will stage a wildcat strike if the management so much as propose changing the brand of teabags in the staff canteen. A couple of undercover reporters posed as casual workers to dig the dirt, and did a sterling job, never once taking delivery of a fist in the face despite giving every member of sta...

Posted by Stewart Turner Most commentators agree the Labour Party needs nothing short of a miracle to win a fourth term when the country goes to the polls in May – and if they were looking to veteran MP Austin Mitchell to win over a few hearts and minds and score a few political points in last night’s highly watchable Tower Block of Commons, they were sadly mistaken. The show rehoused four MPs – the Tories got two, for some unexplained reason – in grim, inner-city high-rises for a week to see how they coped with a slice of edgy urban life, rather than rowing a coracle around their moats all day and paying their children £30k a year to make tea and fetch HobNobs. With Mitchell’s insistence on getting his very own flat – all the other MPs gam...